Amazon has the puzzle pieces. It will be interesting to see if they can make them all fit together.
- Customers. Well over 100 million customers with credit cards on file. Yikes.
- Amazon Prime. Also known as instant gratification. Who doesn’t want two day shipping for all their Amazon purchases, especially heading into the holidays? And once you have two day shipping, it makes you want to buy everything from Amazon since retail (other than Apple) is such a horrendous experience these days. They can afford to lose money on shipping because the Prime customer likely spends tons more than the non-Prime customer. Bundling video streaming into Amazon Prime at a time when Netflix is alienating its customers is huge.
- Amazon App Store for Android tied to those 100+ million credit cards. Google doesn’t have a financial transaction infrastructure. Amazon has transactions in its DNA on a scale that blows everyone else away (with the possible exception of Apple).
- Amazon MP3 Store, Cloud Player & Cloud Drive. Not great yet, but it at least gets them in the game. Still really a cloud storage offering more than a media offering, but that’s an important piece of the user experience in a device-centric world. Acquire Spotify for music streaming and make my day. Go ahead, I dare you.
- Kindle family. It looks like Kindle will turn into a product line ranging from the basic Kindle for hard core readers to the Kindle Flame for a richer media experience. Kindle is already a reading brand. It’s about to become a media consumption brand. That could carve out a compelling consumer use case to focus on.
Amazon has more pieces than anyone. The other Android “licensees” only have their history of designing and manufacturing devices. That’s not enough. If Amazon makes device-based shopping matter and really innovates with books, music and video, they could be a force to be reckoned with. Hopefully, they put enough energy into the end to end user experience. Okay, there is no chance that they will put “enough” energy into it. I’m just hoping that they put a lot more than they have in the past.
I, for one, will tune in tomorrow to see how far they’ve gotten.
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POST ANNOUNCEMENT UPDATE: I totally didn’t see Silk coming and yet it’s possibly the most interesting part…a split browser that takes advantage of the Amazon cloud (AWS) to make everything faster for the Kindle Flame user.